When a machine can't take the job, someone here packs it by hand instead.
Not everything that needs to go out in the post is a flat sheet a machine can grip and feed. Welcome packs, membership kits, event bundles and merchandise-plus-print jobs often involve odd shapes, multiple components that have to match, or a level of judgement no automated line can apply. That's what our hand fulfilment team is for: real people, assembling to a written spec, at whatever volume the job needs.
What hand fulfilment actually involves
Every hand job starts with a spec, not a guess: which items go in, in what order, how they're matched, and what the finished pack has to look like before it's boxed or bagged. Our team works from that spec at benches in our Dublin 3 facility, checking each item as it goes in rather than trusting a sensor to catch a mistake.
That matters most when the job involves matching, a membership number that has to correspond to the right welcome letter, a personalised card that has to sit with the right merchandise, a regional variant that has to go to the right list. A person checking each item catches mismatches a machine simply isn't built to notice, and the finished packs go out only once they meet spec.
When machines can't take the job
Our polywrap and inserting lines are the right tool for high-volume, uniform, flat-format jobs, and nothing beats them on cost per unit at that kind of scale. Hand fulfilment picks up everything outside that box: irregular shapes that won't feed through rollers, small or one-off runs where machine set-up time outweighs the benefit, and any pack combining printed material with an object rather than another sheet of paper.
If your job is mostly straightforward magazine or letter volume with just one awkward component, that's a normal mix for us, not a special case, and we'll often run the bulk of it through our polywrapping and magazine mailing lines and finish the rest by hand.
Kitting physical goods, not just paper
A growing share of what comes through our doors isn't paper at all. Welcome packs for new members or customers, event kits with badges, lanyards and programmes, subscription boxes carrying a product alongside the printed insert, corporate merchandise bundled with a covering letter, we build and pack all of it to spec, then get it out through the post or a courier as required.
Because it's built to a spec rather than run off a standard line, kitting is where bespoke packaging, branded boxes, tissue, ribbon, whatever the brief calls for, gets applied consistently across every pack in the run, not just the ones someone remembered to finish properly.
How this fits alongside the machine lines
Most real jobs aren't purely machine or purely hand, they're a mix. A subscription mailing might run its core magazine through the polywrap line while a hand team assembles a one-off gift insert for renewing members. A membership kit might have its letter laser-printed and its address data cleaned and validated through data management and addressing, before the physical kit itself is built by hand.
One account manager runs the whole job end to end, so you're not coordinating between a machine team and a hand-pack team yourself, and every list we work from is handled under the same GDPR-compliant process whether the output is a flat mail pack or a boxed kit.
Next step
Got a pack that doesn't fit a standard line?
Send us the spec, the items involved and the quantity, and we'll come back with a price and a running method, usually the same working day.
Frequently asked questions
Anything with an irregular shape, a matching requirement between items, a physical product rather than a flat sheet, or a run too short to justify machine set-up. Send us the spec and we'll tell you honestly which approach suits it.
You might also need
Ready to get a price on this job?
Tell us what you're mailing and we'll come back with a quote, usually the same working day.